Just Trying to Get By
by AlreadyPainfullyGone
Summary: AU. Dean is sent to work in a manor house circa every Catherine Cookson novel ever. Once there, he starts to find out a bit about whatever-did-happen-to-baby-Castiel, almost twenty years before. Warnings for light dub-con and (spoiler) themes common in mating fics (no mpreg, promise).
1. Chapter 1

_Yes, I do love Catherine Cookson books :P or at least the ones that make for TV. Hence all the historical inaccuracies etc, because I work, and cannot be bothered to come home and research. (not that I did any when I was unemployed). _

Dean takes his belongings along in a flour sack, his one spare shirt (one of his father's cut down) tin cup, razor and rolled up socks. The journey from his family's home in the hamlet to the big house out over the fells is a long one, almost twenty miles, and by the time he gets there his feet are so sore he winces with every step.

His home was a three room cottage with its own paddock and cattle wade, a bit of ground for vegetables, a beehive. There were no cattle, no bees, and vegetables planted, but they had the land. Their father had let it go since their mother had died, giving birth to the third brother who was even now rotting at the margin of the churchyard. Between them, Sam and Dean had just about managed to bring in that year's planting and sell off the cattle. Now they had nothing left to sell, or pawn, or trade. Their family was flat broke and John had decided that, now that he was alone, he could only support one of his boys. So, Sam would stay behind with John and sell up the cottage, buy a little piece of the land they were cutting out of the hills thirty miles away.

Dean was going to be a hired hand until things picked up.

The big house was actually the home of the Milton family, and Dean had heard a lot about them because they were the only thing anyone in the hamlet, or the villages nearby, ever talked about. Specifically, the story of the youngest son had been passed around and around for years, it was the only ghost story anyone ever told.

The big house in an ivy covered monstrosity, in miles of land and grounds. Dean comes up the gravel walk towards the huge iron studded double doors. It looks more like a fortress than a house.

At the door, there's the man his father set him on with, Robert Singer, the grounds keeper. Dean's going to be working for him, keeping the grounds tidy, bringing fowl and fish in for the cooks, harvesting vegetables and carting goods to market.

"Room's this way," Singer says, taking Dean around the back of the house, and to where the stables are. Over the hay filled stalls, with the sweetish smell of horse shit in the air, is a loft with a compartment spaced off with planks. Inside the little three walled space is smell like pine and leather, and Dean can still hear the horses when he's sitting on the rough wood that he's going to be sleeping on.

"You have your meals in the kitchen, there's a room for staff just off it. You get paid at the end of every year, work five 'till eight, and don't think there's nothing to do once the sun's down, because I will find you something. There's always something around here."

"Yes sir."

Robert looks him over, "well, at least your father brought you up polite. It's Bobby, but it's Singer if anyone from the house is around. That's another thing, don't talk out of turn around the family, or get in their way at all. There's a mean streak a mile wide in the Milton blood, and you don't want that on you."

Dean nodded. Any family that could do _that_ to their own kin was a family he didn't want to get on the wrong side of.

As if reading his mind, Bobby eased himself into a seat on a bale of straw.

"You've heard the stories?"

"Yes sir."

"Do I need to tell you not to mention it?"

"No sir."

"Good. Because it doesn't pay to ask questions, or even think them, not around here. But, I will tell you one thing. On a full moon night, lock the door to this place tight as you can, and place this by the door."

He passed Dean a scrap of paper with a rough image on it.

"Scratch it in the dirt, or chalk it over your bed, just don't go to sleep without it."

"Why?"

Bobby shook his head. "All I know is, I'm the oldest member of the staff, and I was given this sign to protect me from the evils of this house. They never told me why, save that it had to be done." Bobby clasped his hands and looked at them. "Only one person I know of has ever disobeyed, and she was found the next morning in the hallway of the west wing, dead as dust."

Dean shivered, and felt the terrible loneliness of this new life close around him. Had he been with Sam, he could have made a joke of the house's bizarre history, the way he had done all his life. But, alone and friendless, he was afraid, as if he'd never before heard about the Miltons. He clutched the paper tightly in his hand.

"Don't go scaring yourself," Bobby advised, "use the signs, you'll be safe. I've worked here twenty years, and nothing bad has befallen me."

Dean didn't say anything, but he thought that twenty years at the Milton house seemed bad enough.

(*-*)

He ate his dinner that night with the rest of the staff, Bobby sat at the head of the rough trestle table, the cook, Ellen, and the skivvy, Rebecca, were next to him. Josephine and Ruby, the maids, kept to themselves, giggling and swapping stories of the things they'd seen upstairs. There was one other man on staff, besides Bobby, and that was Garth, the groom. For such a large house, the staff was barely above what Dean would expect of a mid-sized mill. He said nothing, but it added to the feeling of abandonment and strangeness that he felt emanating from the house.

That night, he went to bed on a straw pallet in the hay loft, listening to the horses breathing and stamping in the darkness below. He missed Sam and his father, missed the sounds their house made, and the smells it had. Everything felt terrible and unfamiliar.

At every sound he started, and, though it was a new moon, he dug out the scrap of paper, and practiced the sign on it, over and over again.

The worst moment came when he had to get up in the small hours to relieve himself outside. He walked, heart in his mouth around to the back of the building, and pissed into the weeds on the bit of ground by the end of the kitchen garden. Walking back, eyes wide to take in the almost non-existent light, starting at every shadow, every sound, he glanced up at the hulking shape of the house that stood over him. The leaded windows like dark jewels, and the almost black veins of ivy hanging over it. It looked like an elaborate mausoleum.

Dean stopped, his heart shot through with cold iron.

There's a face looking down at him. Pale, a smudge behind one of the windows on the top floor, but it's there, and the two dark hollows of its eyes are fixed on him.

He can't move, can hardly breathe, all he can think is that, whoever it is that is looking out on him, they do not wish him well. The face doesn't turn away, but moves back from the glass, as its owner draws back from the glass, slowly and silently.

Dean runs to the barn, bolts the door, and, as big as he can, he scrawls the sign on the straw covered dirt.


	2. Chapter 2

The next day, Dean wakes, drags himself out of his makeshift bed while it's still mostly dark, and gets himself to the pump to wash. While dousing himself with cold water, he chides himself for being so fearful. He's grown, independent, he's lived his life in the deep countryside, where people where few and far between. He is not like those who come to the country from large towns and cities, starting at every owl screech and scrabbling fox.

Bobby sets him to work pulling knuckles of root from a border in the gardens. Dean sweats and hauls at the thick roots, putting them into a bucket and taking them to the far edge of the estate, where they make a dirty little bonfire. After that he cuts wood, stacks it and finally gets a moment to choke down bread and dark tea in the kitchen. Even then, he forgets to wash his hands, and earns himself a swat with a large spoon and a harsh word for his foolishness.

Bobby works him throughout the day, hauling water for the animals from the pump to the stables and sty, cutting root vegetables into cattle feed and taking it around to the small holding. Then he gets set to clear brush from a corner of one of the paddocks that the young lords like to ride in.

At the end of the day, Dean sluices his cut hands in water and eats his evening meal in silence. He falls onto his pallet and sleeps like a dead thing, until the rising sun gets him up again.

It's not that he's never worked hard, it's that he's never been worked. He's never gone from one task to another with someone directing him, unable to sit for even a moment or take a drink of water. He's always had Sam helping as best he could, or sometimes even his Father. But, not he is alone, shouldering the work of the man he believes himself to be, struggling like the boy he still is.

His extreme tiredness does however quench his sense of fear. He's too exhausted to stay up and fret in the dark, and even when he has to venture into the dark at night he's too tired to look for strange faces pressed to windows.

Which is fortunate, as, more often than not, his nighttimes wanderings were watched from overhead. Had Dean known, he probably would have packed his few belongings, and run from the Milton house as fast as he could.

Dean knew only one story about the Miltons, and it was enough to know that tale, and it's minor variations, enough to warn him of ever straying from the tasks that he was set.

The Miltons were a wealthy family, and had always been so. The parents, Michael and Rachel, had three sons, Balthazar, Raphael and Baldur, as well as two daughters, Anna and Naomi. These children were the envy of most country society, being exceptionally well dressed and well educated. The women excelled at dance, music and art, and were well behaved and graceful. The male children were equally accomplished in the arts of shooting, hunting, scholarly pursuits and finance, and were adored by almost every eligible daughter for a far way from the bounds of the estate.

They were each of them, however, as cruel as they were beautiful, as distant as they were perfect, and as unfeeling as they were accomplished.

The Miltons had been happy, in their own, private and callous way. The male children were aged between 20 and 16, the daughters of marriageable age, and still the money flowed to the family, they made and destroyed fortunes with ease, and it was well known that the eldest son, Raphael, was the terror of every maid in the villages about the county.

And then, on one night in the dead of winter, every member of the house's staff was dismissed, and sent walking in a long, dark snake of disgruntled bodies, through the eddying snow.

The house had employed some hundred people in its running, from grooms to farm hands, to butlers and ladies maids. They had even hired a seamstress to work on site, as well as a team of chefs and cooks and gardeners.

All of them were woken from their slumber, or dragged from their nighttimes duties, and told to leave without collecting their belongings. They were each given a handful of coins, and sworn to tell no one of the events of that night, which few of them had witnessed directly.

Still, word circulated in the villages for weeks afterwards, and the rumour seemed confirmed when the body of a midwife was discovered, half buried in a shallow grave out in the woods.

The mistress Rachel had borne a child, and that child had not been seen by a living soul since.

High society accepted that the child had been stillborn, and went about its business as if nothing strange had occurred. But the villagers, fed on the whispers of the Milton's departing staff, knew differently. Because, on that cold night, when the maids and serving hands and cooks had made their way from house to house, before leaving for good, the story had been shared.

The baby had been seen. By who, no one was sure, the rumour spread too quickly. But the knowledge remained, the mistress had given life to a monster, a barely recognisable creature, which she had cast from her with horror.

And that creature had been murdered by its own parents, before it could take its first free breath.

No one knew where the monster was buried, or what had become of its freakish remains. But, days after the midwife was discovered, her throat cut, some letters were found, carved into a fallen tree, above the date of that night, etched cleanly into the wood.

Castiel.

It was a word that few in the village could read, and fewer could pronounce. They dared not even try, for it was the name of the monster, that could not be doubted. And to utter it might well bring disaster down on them.

Like all the rest, Dean knew the name, knew that 'Castiel' still haunted the Milton house, the ghastly cry of its newborn lungs echoing through its mouth, though the creature must now be older than Dean is himself.

Dean tries not to think of the stories, and gives them no more credence than he would give the rest of the ghost stories he has heard. At least, during the day he pushes the idea aside. At night, the idea grows legs, and a mind of its own, and it refuses to leave him be. It dogs his every step.

He keeps the sign by his bed freshly drawn, and though he thinks himself foolish when he wakes to it in the morning, each night finds him drawing it again.


	3. Chapter 3

For two weeks, Dean works himself through soreness and blisters, through exhaustion, through welts and scratches, through tears of effort and chill, through mindless, sleep deprived fugue. His hands grow tough and strong, his arms and shoulders, legs and chest put on muscle he never had while tending his father's small holding. His clothes become rich with a patina of sweat, rain water and dirt, and even though he scrubs them clean in a bucket of water every few days, they are soon stained and worn beyond the capabilities of his clumsy hands and a palmful of sand.

Still, the work makes him happy, in a grim, tired way. He clears land, digs over plots, hauls water, chops firewood, builds a new chicken coop, mends fences, tends to the horses with Garth, mends the coach, and a thousand other jobs.

Since his arrival, he's started mixing with the other members of staff and has made, if not friends, then at least warm acquaintances. Bobby is still the closest thing he has to someone who cares about him, but Garth is friendly, and the cook watches him wolf down his portion with satisfied amusement.

He misses Sam, misses having someone look up to him, someone he can tell jokes to and, yeah, boss around when he wants to. Here he's at the bottom of the pile, and he feels it in every moment he spends near the house. Out on the grounds it's not so bad, but when he's around the house itself, or even the stable, he stands a chance of meeting a Milton.

So far, he's only come across Baldur and Raphael, as well as the master of the house, and even then he's only seen them from a distance. At least, until the three of them come back from riding, clattering their mounts into the yard and leaving the foaming beasts to whicker exhaustedly, with on one to bring them into their stalls, or even fill their troughs with water. Dean came from the side of the house, where he'd been reconstructing a low stone wall, and started tending to the animals.

Raphael, and thin, dark haired man with a cloudy complexion, threw his mud spattered riding coat at Dean, where it landed over his back, making him jump. The coat fell to the ground as he turned, dropping into a mud puddle.

"Pick it up, you clumsy idiot!"

Dean bent and retrieved the coat, nod sodden with mud, and the runoff from the stable floor, which he had cleaned that morning.

"Clean it," Raphael ordered, his face burning with anger at the state that his coat had gotten into, purely because of Dean's ineptness.

"But," Dean said, then stopped himself.

It was too late.

"What did you say?" Baldur said, coming over to stand by his brother, "Father, the boy spoke out of turn to Raphael."

"We should have him beaten," Raphael suggested.

Michael, an imposing man even in repose, was terrifying in his black riding clothes, his dark hair standing up against a breeze like the horns of a beast, a leather crop in one gloved hand. Still, for one second, perhaps two, Dean hoped that the elder Milton might step in and temper the scene developing around him.

The old man looked at him for barely a moment, then tossed his crop to the elder of his two sons, as if he were already bored by their anger.

The first blow caught Dean as a surprise, he was still looking to Michael to show restraint. It sliced across his cheek and stung enough to make him bring a hand up quickly to cover the wound. The second swipe stung his hand, and then again against the side of his neck.

That was as far as it got before Dean caught the crop, wrenching it from Raphael's grasp and striking back.

A red wheal appeared across Raphael's shocked face, and, for a frozen moment, no one moved. Dean could hear his own loud breathing, and, in the silence he could swear he heard a window slamming shut. As he turned his face in a foolish movement, looking up at the house, he saw the flash of pale skin at the highest window, where the glass still shimmered as it rattled in it's frame.

Then, a blow landed against his head, and hands grabbed him, hard fingers under leather gloves. They dragged him across the yard, around the edge of the house to the kitchen garden, and from there down into the coal cellar.

As they threw him down the cold, filthy stone, he heard Baldur say,

"Have a pleasant night."

The hatch behind him closed, leaving him in absolute darkness.

(-*-)

For a while, Dean was convinced that Bobby or Garth, or one of the other servants would come and help him, but, as the hours passed and the cellar grew colder still, he realised that they were likely too afraid for their jobs, and their hides, to go against the wishes of Baldur and Raphael.

Sitting on the freezing stone, Dean cursed himself for not being clever enough to hold back and keep himself from acting as he would have if another youth had attacked him. They were his masters, and he was barely above the level of a slave. Looking around into the hopeless dark, Dean knew he had better get used to the feel of coal dust on his skin, because when he was finally turned out of the cellar, he would have to go and get himself set on at a mine. No house would touch him after this.

Sick with the idea that he had failed Sam and his father, in so short a time, Dean huddled on the floor and stared into the blackness around him.

After what felt like many hours, he started to wonder if they would ever let him out. He was beyond hungry, and chilled to the bone. How long had he been in the cellar? Where were the Milton sons? He had struck Raphael very hard, for that indignity, could they justify his death?

Were they going to starve him in the cellar?

Shaking, he felt his way around the filthy walls, not caring that he was surely covered in coal dust, eventually he found the hatch that he had come in through, and he tried to force it open, but it was stuck fast. Looking around for something to break the lock, or one of the panels, he found nothing, save for a square hole in the wall. Feeling inside, he felt the relative warmth of the wooden base, the cold stone walls of it. A chain snaked up the back, up a long shaft about the size of a bee box.

Dean searched the room and found nothing but sacks of coal, and two locked doors. He waited for hours more, and, as fear began to eat a hole in his gut, he approached the square hole, and felt the chain in his hands. He knew he could climb it, he'd once climbed one similar to get in and out of their dried out well at home. Still he hesitated.

He had lost his job, that was certain, but he still had his life. If he fell from halfway up the chain, however far it went, he would surely die.

Looking into the impenetrable darkness, he decided that he'd rather risk breaking his neck, than whatever Baldur and Raphael had in store for him.

(-*-)

Working carefully, Dean squeezed into the narrow shaft and started to climb. The chain was slick with damp, and because it hung at the back, he grazed his knuckles frequently against the stone. Still, with his boots against the wall and his hands clawing at the chain, he climbed steadily, until, after the point at which he thought his arms would fail him, he felt an absence of wall against his back, a second before he pitched through the gap, and onto a plush floor.

Scrambling on the carpet, Dean got to his feet, and looked about him.

He knew instantly that he should have stayed in the cellar.

He was in a bedroom, one of the grand chambers belonging to the Milton family. In shades of grey from the moon at the diamond-leaded window, he sees plush carpet, dark drapes over an enormous bed, huge cabinets and tables of curved artistry, gleaming candelabra, plaster mouldings and an ornate marble fireplace.

Dean doesn't trust himself to breathe. He is a walking pillar of filth, coal and mud stuck to his fearful sweat and threadbare clothes. One move and he will leave a dirty trail through this room for whoever wakes in it. For that, for this intrusion, they really will kill him.

Slowly, he forces himself to move, towards a window. Perhaps, if he unlatches it, he can climb out. There's no way he can climb back down that slick chain, he'll fall for certain. At the window, he realises with a leaping heart, that it is too far to jump, and there's nothing to climb down. The ivy is a good distance from the sill. Dean looks down at the dark hulk of the stable, wishing that he was safely asleep within its wooden walls.

His stampeding heart stops with a suddenness that almost physically forces him to his knees.

Like a great, ripe fruit, the full moon hangs over the barn.

The light of it shines over Dean, through what he recognises at last as the uppermost window in the house, and, as he turns, he sees it gleaming on the door to the bedroom, a gleaming metal plated door, with no handle.

And it's only as his body stops sucking in air, that he hears the sound of someone else's ragged breathing, in the room with him.

Dean can't move, can't breathe, can't even make a sound. The sound of breathing is close, no more than a few feet away, coming from behind the half drawn drapes of the bed. There's a faint rustle, like sheets moving, the shifting of restless limbs.

Everything in Dean's body is screaming at him to run, but there's nowhere to run too. The window is too high, the shaft he climbed, which he dimly realises must be a dumb waiter, is too difficult to descend. His only hope is that the door is unlocked, that, by some miracle, someone has neglected to seal up the occupant of the room he has stumbled into.

With his ears straining, his eyes opened as wide as possible, Dean creeps towards the door, and feels for a hand-hold. His sweating fingers skate over the cool metal, but find nothing but flat topped screws. He pushes the door, nothing. He tries pulling on it with his grip-less fingers, nothing. At least, panting, he turns away from the door, frantically looking for another way out.

There is a pale face looking at him from the dark cavern of the bed.

Dean doesn't move, but the face does. It comes closer, and with it, the shadows of arms and legs, moving over the dark sheets of the bed. Bare feet land softly on the carpet, thin legs disappearing into linen under things, a bare pale chest, and the face that Dean has seen before, at the window, topped with a smudge of dark hair.

Dean finds his voice.

"You stay away," he says, forcing the tremor from his words. "Stay away from me."

The man, for it is a man, or rather, a boyish man, about Dean's own age, though it is hard to tell in there dim light, stays where he is. But Dean can see what he couldn't before, the man is pained. The pale body shudders in pain, and he can see that his hands are clutching the edge of the bed, as if to keep him from sliding to the floor.

"Are you hurt?" Dean says, without thinking.

The figure shakes it's head, but in a vague, amused way, as if the man is the complete opposite of harmed – or as if he's afflicted with madness.

He lifts one pale, shining arm, and his hand beckons Dean towards him.

And, although Dean has felt his breath stop since he entered the room, he has, in fact, been breathing steadily since he entered. It is only now that he registers just what it is that he's been breathing – a smell like fresh earth, and the sun making sweet, toasted hay out of summer grass, like the hard wrung sweat of a dance at fair time.

Dean moves forwards, slightly held back by his rational mind, but, moving nonetheless.

As soon as he drifts within arm's reach of the man on the bed, he feels those arms going around him, , turning him, pressing him with restrained eagerness onto the dark sheets, which smell strongly like the close air around him. And Dean's breath catches, he tries to get up, to move, but his limbs are like warm, content animals with their own minds, and his body doesn't move.

When the other man's body settles over his, the scent intensifies, and Dean feels buried in it, in the sweetness of apples incorrectly stored, touching and turning overripe and treacly. He is held under the dark canopy of the bed, breathing in burnt peat and the animal smell of _everything. _Of livings things left waiting far too long.

He barely notices when hands pull his shirt open, but when the man, the creature of the Milton house, moves to undo hi s trousers, Dean makes a sound of protest, the only thing he can do while lying prone on the bed.

Smooth hands, hands that have never worked or fought or taken another hand in theirs, stroke his stomach, and Dean tilts his head back, his eyes closed as a combination of fear, confusion and curiosity wash over him. This is not his choice. He doesn't want to choose. He doesn't know how.

The other man quickly strips Dean's trousers down past his knees, dropping his filthy boots to the floor and throwing the warn cloth after them. Dean shivers, exposed, and yet when he feels hot, slick thighs on either side of his own, he moans at the unexpected contact, the unfamiliar stickiness on his skin. The man's skin is burning hot, like a demon, and Dean wonders for the first time if he is being seduced by the Devil himself.

With his head swimming in scent and broken sensation, Dean had barely noticed his body's response to that of the man on top of him. It's only when the man mounts him, sinking down with such a cry of relief that he sounds wounded, that Dean lets out his own shout of pleasure. He had not realised that he had grown hard, but, with scorching heat and thick wetness pressed close around his member, he can't think any further. He has never experienced sex before, and his mind is well and truly soaked in pleasure, his body to hot and slick to feel strange or wrong.

The man on top of him moves with deep groans and cries, as if on the verge of sobbing. Dean can barely form thoughts, let along words, and his noises are soft and barely voiced, he feels so weak. His eyes open as a crisis tears his body apart, as the man on top of him jerks, his body drawn long like a bow, tightening impossibly around Dean until he feels like his life is being drawn out of him, until pleasure borders on pain. And Dean begins to struggle, because, beyond the pale figure on top of him, there are huge dark wings, illuminated by the moon.

As Dean fights to shake off the hot weight of the scent and his own wretched orgasm, the man sides off of him, landing on the bed and curling on his side, the freakish wings folding over him. Dean drags himself from the bed, shirt open and naked from the waist down, and moves as far away as he can, clawing his trousers from the floor as he does so.

Mostly dressed again, he seizes a candelabrum in his sweating hand, and turns back to the bed, body tight with fear.

The figure on the bed hasn't moved, and it's limbs are still beneath the shaking wing-mass.

It takes a minute for Dean to realise that the dry, horrible sound he can hear, is coming from the creature.

It takes longer for him to identify the rough, choking sounds as sobs.


	4. Chapter 4

Dean stays where he is, the cool metal of the candelabrum growing hot and sweaty in his hand. His trousers are clinging to the slick which coats his groin and thighs. The scent of the room, of the creature, is all over him, seeping into his skin, so strong that he can almost taste it. Like poppies, like copper and rain falling on hot dust.

"Stop it," he says, almost to himself, he doesn't know whether he means for the creature to stop crying, or stop emitting the scent that's making his head spin, but his voice is so faint he's not even sure the thing hears.

But either way, the soft, broken sobs continue, and the figure on the bed, half cloaked in feathers, remains a shaking mass of limbs and rustling wings.

Dean moves across the room, without making a decision to do so. His hand goes slack on the candelabrum, and he lets it drop to the floor. When he gets close enough to touch the bed, he reaches out, and slowly brings his fingers towards where the nearest feathers are lying. As soon as his fingers make contact, the thing starts shaking, choking on it's own miserable sobs.

The feathers aren't soft, like Dean thought they'd be, they're long and have hard spines, and the fluff that makes them up is sparse and narrow, so the feathers look like thin daggers. They're slightly damp, like there's sweat on them, only it's slightly oily, like the roots of Dean's own hair.

When the feathers are snatches away, Dean jumps back, heart tripping over itself. The creature has righted itself, pulling it's wings in closer to its body. He's also watching him closely, his eyes wet and dark.

"Leave," he says quietly, and it's the first time Dean has heard him speak. His voice is dry, like pages turning, like the blade of a shovel scraping on stone.

"I can't," Dean manages to say, "I..."

"Leave!" He fans his wings, his voice louder.

Dean backs away half a pace. If he could, he'd be running away, away from the house, the village, all the way to where Sam is lying in his warm, safe bed. But, he can't get out of this room, and even if he did, he'd be somehow stuck with what's just happened to him. He's not the same person he was when he went into the coal cellar.

"What's wrong with you?"

The dark wings fall back to the bed, lifeless.

"I'm a monster." The man says, as if he knows it the way Dean knows his own name. "and the moon...the moon makes me...it hurts." His face changes, suddenly becomes alive with earnest panic, "You have to go away, because this is bad, very bad, and if you're here, I don't know if I can..." he shakes his head, and another heavy waft of scent catches Dean off guard, he barely manages to get onto his knees before his legs buckle entirely, and he is left on the floor like a broken puppet, one hand clutching at the creature's knee for support. The skin under his hand is the finest he has ever encountered, blemish less and smooth, hot against his palm.

The man makes a sound like he's in pain, and Dean feels fingers twist into his hair, stroking his scalp. He turns his head, pressing into the touch and closing his eyes, because it feels so good, that hand on his hair, his face. His own hand bats against his thigh and he realises that he has grown hard again, despite exhausting himself only minutes ago. He presses forwards and bites at the creature's thigh, feeling soft, smooth skin under his teeth, tastes the heavy, hot slick that makes the linen undergarment of the other man so sodden. He rubs his face against it.

"Don't," the creature doesn't push him away, and the word itself sounds like it's echoing out of a deep vault.

Dean's eyes are closed, his head buzzing with the scent, that scent, he licks the fabric, presses his face between the creature's thighs and licks the damp linen, finding where the slick flows sweetest and sucking.

A hand presses the back of his head, and he can feel the man's thighs shake, hear him moan. Dean reaches up, and without thinking about what he's doing, pulls at the flimsy garment, ripping it along the groin. The scent hits him like a wall of stone, the hot weight of the creature's manhood falls against his cheek, he buries his face in the hot space between the man's spread thighs, licks up into the close heat, sucking down the taste of salt and crushed petals. He barely even notices the hungry, wet sounds he makes, the moans that escape him as he laps at the creature's dripping hole. The whimpers of the man above him fall on deaf ears.

The sharp retort of a gunshot, the howling of dogs, breaks Dean from whatever trance the scent had led him into. He pulls away from the man so sharply that he ends up on his back, on the floor, listening as men shout in the courtyard below, and Baldur bellows that the man who finds the escaped boy will have his purse filled.

Dean lies gasping, unable to take in a breath without tasting the slick on his lips, running over his chin as if he's gorged himself on overripe fruit. As he gasps, he realises that he can't get his breath, hysteria washes over him, and he almost shouts when the other man's hot body falls on top of him.

"Shhh," he feels cool breath against his face. "I'm sorry, I'm so sorry..." there's the edge of a moan in the words, a loss of control that Dean can feel in the way the creature touches him. A mouth falls against his, tasting the sweet stickiness there and moaning into Dean's mouth. Hands force his trousers away again, down his legs, and for the second time, Dean feels the blissfull heat of the other's man's slick, tight body around him. His body jerks off of the floor is small movements, whether to try and get deeper inside the man on top of him, or to throw him off, Dean honestly doesn't know.

This time the man moves slower, the heat is less intense, and Dean feels cool relief getting closer, the promise of rest.

When he comes, it's with an internal heave of effort that leaves him boneless and warm. The body on top of him goes limp, wings falling over them as it collapses onto his chest, and they lie on the carpet, smudged with coal dust, for a long time. Dean listens to the creature breathe, to the soft sounds of feathers shifting and catching on the carpet.

The scent dissipates, loses its vitality and compelling overtones, and becomes just the strong odour of warm feathers, dark petals and hot grass.

"I, am a monster," the man says softly, as if the words hurt as he says them, his face pressed against Dean's throat. "I, am a monster, I'm a monster, I'm..."

Dean shakes him gently, and pushes him away until he can look at him.

"What are you? Really, what are you?"

"I'm-"

"You're not a monster, you're..." Dean shakes his head, "you look like something out of a picture, one of the ones in church. Like one of the angels." He reaches for the feathers that are fanned around them on the floor, "you have wings but...but angel's don't act this way, they don't..."

The man blinks at him. "What's an angel?"

"How do you not know what they are?" Dean stares at him. He cannot really read or write, and even he knows about angels.

"This is what I know," the man looks around the dark room. "I have books but...nothing about angels."

"How long have you been here?"

The man blinks, "Always."

"...alone?"

"Yes."

Dean doesn't understand. The man must have been a child, the child of the story, Castiel, the missing Milton son. He was a baby once, twenty years ago, someone must have cared for him until he was old enough to feed himself and bathe. Yet...he doubts it, the man's face is smooth and honest, as if he couldn't lie if his life depended on it.

They had flung their baby into a room and locked it, perhaps hoping that it would die. But the baby, newborn and with blood still clinging to it's wings, had survived, alone, in this room, and grown for twenty years in solitude with only dusty books and scattered junk to amuse itself with.

"What did you do, to me?" Dean asks. "Castiel...that's you? If you aren't a man, then what is it that's happening to you?"

The man's mouth twitches, forming the first syllable of his name. "That's...they call me that. It's written on the door."

Dean doesn't look, but he trusts that the word is there.

"It's carved on a tree trunk in the woods." Dean says, mostly to himself.

Castiel nods. "To keep me here, so that I don't do to anyone what I have done to you. I'm so sorry for...for all of this, you shouldn't have come, I should not have allowed this to happen...it just, it aches, I ache, under the moon. And then you were here."

"What aches?"

"_I _do." Castiel's voice is guttural, "every time the moon is full, I feel this...pain, inside of me. I cannot keep myself comfortable, or cool, I burn from the inside out, and all this...this, wetness, comes." He puts his arms around himself, and for the first time, Dean notices the imprints of fingernails on Castiel's palms, from where he's curled his hands into fists. "There had been nights where I thought I would go mad, unless someone would touch me, touch me _there_, and make the ache stop."

Dean's dry lips move, "Heat...it's called heat. Animals feel it, when they need to find mates, they go into heat."

"And people?"

Dean shakes his head. "People aren't like that."

"Oh." Castiel's voice is small and sad.

"But, I felt...whatever that smell was, it made me want...it made me feel those things too. The ache, the heat...so, maybe we are a bit the same." Dean says.

Castiel shakes his head. "No, I'm bad, that's why I'm here. Because I'm not like them, my brothers...because I'm a monster."

"Well, your family are monsters for keeping you here," Dean says, "for putting a baby, alone in a room for years...I don't even know how you're still alive, let alone why you let them keep you here."

"They don't, you do." Castiel says, "the symbols drawn all over the house, the grounds...they keep me here, just like the writing of my name on the door, and by the road. They name me so I cannot pass, and my secret name is the symbol that locks even the air to me."

Dean feels cold, he'd thought that symbol was there to protect him from a monster, not to keep a lonely man locked up in a dusty old room.

"What happens when the ache starts?" he asks, "you can't go anywhere, you just..."

"I wait for it to end, I-" Castiel blinks and tears leak onto his cheeks, "I pray for it to be over, and I feel like my skin is crawling all over me, like there isn't a kind or soft thing in the world or a place where I don't hurt, I try not to make noise, because once..." he looks terrified, "once, when it started, when I was...I was smaller, the...heat...came for the first time, and I cried, I screamed...and the door opened, I was struck with something sharp, from far away, and I slept for a long time." He shivers, holds his arms up so Dean can see the long ragged scars on them, white with age. "I clawed myself raw as I slept...when I woke up there was blood all over me...and I don't want that to happen again."

Dean puts his arms around him, feeling Castiel's wings fold around him, the smooth skin of the other man's back under his hands. He feels warm, and right, and solid.

"You were scared," Castiel whispers, "I didn't want to do it but...you were here, and you smelt like...like outside, like...I wanted so badly and...and you were here. I didn't mean to, I'm sorry."

Dean is not used to emotion, to the subtleties of human feeling. His father never let him see the naked grief he felt over losing his wife, and Dean has never felt more than affection, the smooth, brown limbed love he feels for his brother and father. Even his mother's death was an ordinary passing, painful, but inevitable. He has never experienced a need so terrible and frightening that it cuts you open and scrapes out everything that you are, or were, or could be.

But, holding Castiel in his arms, he knows two things. The first is that, the man he holds, the angel in his arms, is broken, and hurt, and leaning on him as if Dean is the only thing he has in the world. And Dean feels...everything, for him, a wide, terrifying emotion that encompasses everything he knows of peace and pain and ferocity and want – it's something that he will learn to call love.

The second thing, is that he can feel beneath his skin, that he is changed. That something of Castiel has entered him and made him different, made them separate from the world, part of each other, always. He knows that he is now the only person for whom Castiel exists, and that Castiel is all he wants.

And that he will stop at nothing to get Castiel away from the Milton house, to earn him his freedom. Even if he dies in the attempt.


	5. Chapter 5

Glass falls in sharp diamonds to the cobbles below.

Raphael looks up at the dark casement where the window frame hangs sad and empty behind its bars. A moment later, another window breaks, more glass falls in a sparkling cloud.

Raphael curses under his breath, then calls for his brothers.

He had hoped this night would never come.

(-*-)

Dean leaves the window, the candelabra still in his hand, and hurries to the door, where he smashes at the plate that bears Castiel's name. He hammers hard until the letters are blemished and broken.

Castiel lets out a shuddering breath, clutches the wall.

"I think...I think it's working...how did you-"

"I'm guessing," Dean says, eyes searching the whole room for any kind of weapon. "They'll be here soon."

He raises the candelabra and strikes the name again.

(-*-)

The whole house trembles as Raphael hurries up the stairs, Baldur and Michael in tow.

The chandelier over the hall trembles, it's crystals tinkling, the stairs and walls creaks, and tiles shudder loose from their moorings in the hearths and break.

"No!" Michael shouts, reaching the landing. "Stop it, Stop it at once!"

(-*-)

The name is almost distorted beyond recognition.

Castiel touches Dean's arm. He is white and strained, his wings full and flaring out behind him.

"Dean..."

"I'm almost done."

"Dean."

Dean turns, and finds himself staring into a pair of pitch black eyes.

"I think we've made a terrible mistake." Castiel breathes.

(-*-)

As one, Raphael, Baldur and Michael reach the doorway of Castiel's chamber.

The door in front of them shimmers out of existence, followed by the walls, the floor, and then they too fade away like an old painting before the rays of the sun.

Dean stands aghast as the whole house disappears like faye mist. Until it is just him and Castiel, standing in the middle of a field by a twisted old tree, from which a flock of ravens burst, startled.

Dean falls to his knees, the sudden transformation of the house having sucked the strength from his very bones.

Some distance away, a group of white mice, Bobby, Ellen and the rest of the staff of the hall, run through the tangled grasses, one of them still sporting a stubble, the other a pair of tiny stays.

Castiel stands beneath the starry sky, beneath the full moon and the clouds. He stands beneath the atmosphere, the stratosphere. The galaxies between him and the end of everything. He can see it all.

And beyond that, is heaven.

How could he have forgotten heaven?

Tears fill his eyes, falling over his face. He had forgotten hell. Now it returns, in all it's bloody horror.

Every inch of his skin shivers.

God, if only he'd known. Known just what he was doing...he might have spared himself all of this.

"Castiel?"

Castiel turns and finds Dean standing on shaking legs. He is young and good and...soiled, Castiel can see that. He has done this. There's dual pang in him, there's the horror that he is the one who has taken this boy's virginity, followed by the sweetest tang of belonging.

"I remember now."

Dean swallows, takes a step forward. "The house..."

"The house wasn't real...none of it was." He looks about himself. "I think...I think I made it."

"What..." Dean shakes his head as if trying to clear it, though in the process he almost loses his balance. "You made the..."

"I created it." Castiel touches the dark trunk of the tree. "I emerged here, from hell. I was hurt, desperate. I needed somewhere to hide myself away, so I created this place, made it my home, with wards and guards and spells to keep them out...but I didn't know they'd make me forget how I came to be here."

"Hell?" Dean says, his voice cracking. "You came from Hell?"

Castiel turns to him, and Dean flinches away. Sorrow strikes Castiel through the heart.

"Yes."

"I thought you were an angel."

Castiel blinks, how to explain, that he can be both and nothing, everything and a negative space all at once.

"I was." He looks down at his hands. Where had he found this pattern, this body? It was an illusion he had created, but still, he was not the most imaginative, it had to be from somewhere. Returning his gaze to Dean he says softly. "You had best return to your family...thank you, for freeing me."

Dean doesn't move.

"I gave you permission to leave," Castiel says.

Dean shifts a little, as if he's nervous, but his words come out exact and solid. "I don't want to."

If Castiel was once an angel who had difficulty understanding the whys and wherefores of humans, his most recent past has made it ten times worse. He no longer understands himself, let alone other angels, let alone demons, let alone humanity. He does not understand Dean's refusal to leave him.

Put, nevertheless, he is pleased by it.

"Then stay by me."

Dean comes forwards slowly, but he lets Castiel seat them both on the grass, settling one wing around him. The feathers smell like the night sky, like distance and age and a deeper dark and brighter light than Dean will ever know.

"It's cold out here," Castiel says quietly, "I'd forgotten that I could be cold."

"I don't think I've ever not been cold," Dean scrunches up, knees to his chest, "Sam and I...well, there's never enough wood around for a proper fire, most of its wet, and Dad doesn't haul it anymore."

Castiel cocks his head like he's trying to comprehend such a small, human thing as lighting a fire to stay warm. He remembers fire, but not the kind of which Dean speaks. Not the kind that keeps you warm and comforts you with its dry crackling. He remembers the fire that burns from the inside out. The fire that eats only the flesh and sweetness, leaves the bitter and dark.

"When I was an angel," he says carefully, "I didn't feel either, the heat, or the cold...I don't know if that was better."

Dean shifts and looks at him, and Castiel knows that the fear in him isn't gone, but it is somehow tempered by love. While he understands the one, the latter is something he's only been witness to, but he can feel it growing in his breast, and, as savage might acknowledge a strange new plant without understanding it's biology, genus and evolution – So Castiel appreciates the slow growth of love inside himself. In a place he'd thought burnt to ashes.

"You're different," Dean says at last.

"I am." Castiel agrees, "because I remember."

"How did you get to hell?"

"The normal way." Castiel says, then, seeing that Dean frowns innocently at his response, he elaborates. "I fell...a long way."

"You couldn't fly?" Dean strokes his wing as he says it, and though Castiel has experienced pleasure before, this is a new kind – it's a prideful, sorrowful kind of pleasure, and he closes his eyes to feel it to the fullest.

"I wasn't able to fly, no...my wings were injured."

"By what?"

"By the other angels."

Dean goes quiet, and Castiel draws him close to his chest, wraps his arms and wings around the small human, barely more than a boy, still but half turned into a man, who had come to him when he was alone, when he'd lost himself, and made him remember.

Thought it hurt to remember, it was a rapture to hold him in his arms, and the two sensations made Castiel tremble.

The things he'd endured in hell were things that he had no words for. With his command of every language, both human, infernal and celestial, he had no words for the agony of the pit, because it was a pain that occurred on a level that wasn't purely physical or spiritual. He had had parts of himself taken that he couldn't name, other parts twisted and cut and moulded until they were unrecognisable. The Castiel after hell was not the Castiel before hell, and yet he was at a loss as to how to explain the difference. True, he felt now, felt more – but like what he couldn't say.

One thing was certain, he would never forgive them for pushing him, for flinging him in their terror down into the pit.

And why? Why had they done it?

Because for a second he had looked below and wondered...wondered for no more than a splintered second, if there might be...more, if maybe he wasn't quite sure that he didn't want...more.

That maybe God, and heaven and the other angels wasn't enough.

That maybe he wanted something for himself.

A selfish angel...that was something they had no encountered before.

"If I go back to Sam, to my Dad...you're coming with me, right?" Dean asked softly.

Torn from a lighter plain of memory, of bloody feathers like knives and clouds that boiled with hate, Castiel blinked and came back to the night, to the boyish man in his arms, to the softness of skin on his, the breath of night air.

"Of course, if you want me."

Dean cupped their hands together. "I can't remember not wanting you." He says, with such a human clumsiness that Castiel's broken, scarred and seared heart bleeds all over again for him, with tenderness, with love. "I think I've always wanted you...just, I didn't know it was you."

"When I was in hell," Castiel said, "they used to whisper to me, that I was alone, that I was a kind of...oddity. The angel that became a demon, that I would always be a single entity, That angel, the one that fell into the pit. And I believed them," he turns Dean's rough fingers in his, looking at them, "I think, this is the first time that an angel, any angel, has been glad to be wrong."

Castiel traced a hand over his feathers, then his wings shivered and disappeared.

"Far less likely to attract attention now," he said, then, noting Dean's expression of loss, "I can still show them again, if you'd like me to."

Dean nodded.

Together, Dean, who was not quite a man, and Castiel, who was not quite an angel, walked through the woods towards where John and Sam had settled. They travelled by foot so as to not attract suspicion, for Castiel feared that the angels were watching him. But he heard nothing of them, not a voice in his head, not a flutter in the air.

When they reached the cottage that Sam was caring for, while his father grieved and slept in equal measure, Castiel was accepted readily as another pair of hands and a back that would take any work placed on it.

At night, Castiel parted the illusion that cloaked his wings and showed them to Dean, showed him all he could of his nature, both angelic and demonic, and though Dean was often afraid of the strange things Castiel could do, or show him, or make him feel, his love never wavered, and that surprised Castiel at every turn.

The silence of the angels ceased the worry him eventually, perhaps they no longer cared about him. Perhaps they couldn't feel him, now that he was no longer entirely an angel. Perhaps there had been another war in heaven, as when Lucifer fell. It could be that his entire species was gone, wiped out, with only burnt earth in patches over heaven's surface to mark their passing.

Castiel loved Dean, and that was the limit of his cares.

To be selfish...was that not the greatest luxury?


End file.
